When a bike is not worth repairing

This is the conversation we have most often, and the one where a workshop has the most obvious incentive to tell you the wrong thing. So here is our actual reasoning, written down, so you can hold us to it.

The three things that end it immediately

Some faults are not economic questions, they are safety ones, and we will not repair around them.

A cracked frame or fork. Aluminium and carbon frames do not get repaired here, and steel frame repair is a specialist job that costs more than most bikes are worth. A crack near the head tube or bottom bracket is the end of that frame. We will show it to you rather than just telling you.

A bent frame or fork after a crash. If the frame has taken a hit hard enough to bend, the metal has been stressed in ways you cannot see. Straightening it is not a repair.

Rims worn through at the brake track. On rim brakes, the braking surface wears away, and a rim that has gone concave or is showing a wear indicator will eventually split, usually under braking. New wheels, or a new bike.

The economic test we actually use

For everything else, we ask a simple question: does the cost of the repair exceed what the bike would sell for once repaired, and by how much?

• Repair costs less than half its repaired value. Straightforward, do it.
• Repair costs half to about all of its value. Now it depends on you, and we will lay the options out rather than decide for you.
• Repair costs more than the bike is worth. We will say so plainly, and we will usually still tell you it might be the right call anyway. See below.

The number that matters is the repaired value, not what you paid for it. A bike bought for £700 eight years ago might be worth £180 today, and that is the number the decision hangs on.

The supermarket bike problem

We say this carefully because it sounds snobbish and it is not meant to be. Bikes sold very cheaply are built with parts that cannot be serviced, only replaced, and the replacements often cost more than the whole bike did.

A £120 bike that needs a new wheel, a cassette and a bottom bracket is looking at £160 of parts before anyone has picked up a spanner. There is no version of that arithmetic that works, and we would rather tell you in the first five minutes than take £45 for a service that reveals it.

What we will usually do instead is the safety critical bits only. New brake pads and cables so it stops, the tyres up to pressure, and a chain if the old one is dangerous. That is our brakes and gears charge plus the parts at cost, so around sixty pounds, and the bike is safe for another year, and nobody has pretended it is anything else.

When we tell you to repair it anyway

The arithmetic is not the whole answer, and we would be doing you a disservice if we pretended it was.

A good steel frame is worth repairing well past its resale value, because the frame is the expensive part and it is already sound. The bare frame commuter cost far more to build than the finished bike would sell for, and it was completely the right decision.

A bike that means something to you is not a spreadsheet. The 1980s road bike we brought back was worth a fraction of what it cost to do. The owner rides their father's bike. That was never about the money, and we said so.

And a bike that fits you properly, when you have struggled to find one, is worth keeping alive.

What we will always do

We will tell you before you spend anything. If you bring a bike in and it fails the test, we will say so at the counter and not charge you for the look.

We will show you the actual fault rather than describing it. If we say a rim is worn through, we will put your thumb on it.

And we will give you a number for the safety only option, because a bike that stops properly for around sixty pounds is often the right answer for someone who is not ready to replace it.

If you are weighing this up, email us a description and a couple of details about the bike. We will give you an honest view before you carry it anywhere. That is what the contact page is for.